Friday, August 29, 2014

I’ve been meaning to revisit the subject of my column in
last week’s Dominion Post, which was
reproduced here. It was about Nigel Latta’s TV documentary on alcohol and it
prompted a prickly response from him on his Facebook page.

Latta accused me of resorting to name-calling and said I ignored
the science that shows the harm done by alcohol. Obviously he felt I should
have showed more deference towards the worthy professors he interviewed on the
programme, whose statements he appeared to accept without question (in marked
contrast to the open scepticism he displayed with the one liquor industry representative
who appeared).

Actually, I’ve never denied that alcohol causes harm. It
would be pointless to try. All I have done, consistently, is point out that the
majority of New Zealand drinkers consume alcohol responsibly and without doing
themselves or those around them any harm, and that they would be unfairly penalised
if the anti-liquor crusaders, with their demands for swingeing restrictions, got
their way.

We didn’t hear from, or about, these responsible drinkers.
You never do from people like professors Doug Sellman and Sally Casswell. That
was the main point of my column – one that Latta didn’t answer.

As for science – well, it’s all about which statistics you
choose to cite. The academics who appeared in Latta’s programme are highly
selective about which statistics they present. They highlight dodgy figures that
purport to show how many of us are “problem” drinkers and studiously ignore all
the evidence that shows consumption is declining and that, in any case, New
Zealanders are moderate drinkers by world standards. None of this was mentioned
in Latta’s relentlessly alarmist documentary.

Ultimately, the case against alcohol as articulated by Sellman,
Casswell and Co. has more to do with ideology than science. They use their taxpayer-funded
posts in academia to push for laws that would restrict the freedom and choices
of the mugs who pay their salaries.

I was going to put this response on Latta’s Facebook page,
but when I saw the tone of the comments from his legion of doting supporters,
I realised I’d be wasting my time (he got 3,302 “likes”). So I made do with a brief
statement pointing out that when someone puts himself forward in prime time on
a publicly owned television channel, and takes highly contestable positions on
contentious issues, he becomes fair game for criticism.

It’s possible this is a new experience for Latta, since his
parenting programmes were very popular. (My own wife and daughter were fans.) But
he’d better get used to it.

I also pointed out that $750,000 of taxpayers’ money had
been spent on the current series of six programmes made by Latta. There’s a very
important question to be asked here: is it right that public money is used to
fund a series of highly politicised documentaries on controversial social
issues, and even more provocatively to screen them immediately before an
election?

It’s not the subject matter of the programmes that I object to, nor even the fact
that they put forward views I heartily disagree with. What’s intolerable
is that publicly funded “factual” programmes are so relentlessly
partisan, with no attempt at balance. (I admit I saw only two of them, on
alcohol and inequality, but both adopted simplistic, partisan positions on complex,
politically sensitive issues. People who have seen other programmes in the
series came to much the same conclusion.)

Before I leave this subject, I feel compelled to refer to
some of the comments made on Facebook by Latta’s fans. I think they show
the futility of trying to engage in any sort of useful dialogue.

● Someone wrote that if the Dominion Post endorsed my column then perhaps it was time the paper
reviewed its editorial policy. What you have here, then, is lamentable
ignorance combined with intolerance of dissent – a lethal mix. (A New
Zealand Party voter, perhaps?) That got 111 “likes”.

● Another commenter said that if I had to spend one weekend
in an emergency ward, I’d soon change my tune. (There were several comments
along similar lines.) This is a glorious non-sequitur. So because some people
behave foolishly or badly when they drink, as they unquestionably do (and probably
would even if alcohol was made harder to get), the rest of us must be
penalised?

● Someone else said I’m a global warming denier – ergo, a
heretic. Gasp. What a shame they no longer burn people at the stake. (For the
record, I’ve never “denied” global warming; I’m in no position to. But I am a sceptic,
because people who know a lot more about climate science than I do keep coming
up with good reasons to be sceptical.)

● Someone triumphantly pounced on the fact that several
years ago I wrote a book about wine. Ah, a smoking gun! Clearly, I’m just
another shill for the unscrupulous booze barons Latta talked about. (Inconvenient
fact: hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders drink wine regularly without
ending up in police cells or emergency wards. Who’d have thought?)

● In response to this highly incriminating disclosure,
someone else wrote: “Haha awesome, Karl is a drunk then. That’s why he didn’t
like the programme.” And later, from another commenter: “Forgive him, he was probably rotten
drunk when he wrote it.” Latta must be proud
to have such sophisticated followers. (For the record again, I have four adult
children. They have never seen me drunk.)

● It was pointed out that the academics on Latta’s programme
all said they liked a drink themselves. I noted the same thing – they seemed
to make a point of it. This is part of the cloak of piety they drape around themselves.
It not only presents them as ordinary pleasure-loving Kiwis, but also
demonstrates how grave the problem must be if they’re prepared to deny themselves
the wicked pleasure of a cheap bottle of chardonnay from Pak ’n’ Save just to save
the rest of us. It’s a variation of the old line from the parent or
schoolteacher about to administer corporal punishment: “This hurts me as much
it hurts you.”

There was much more in similar vein, but I didn’t go any
further. Reading comments on Facebook takes through you a cycle of emotions
from depression to hilarity to despair. Nigel’s welcome to them.

Thursday, August 28, 2014

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, August 27.)

Are you disgusted by what’s
going on in politics? I am. We all should be.

Everything about the Dirty Politics affair is reprehensible.
Let’s start with Cameron Slater.

I fully understood the angry
reaction to his headline “Feral dies in Greymouth, did world a favour” after a West
Coast man was killed in a car that was allegedly trying to escape the police.

Slater wasn’t to know that
the dead man’s family had already lost three other sons in accidents, including
one in the Pike River explosion. But anyone with a modicum of sensitivity would
have realised a family would be grieving. A cruel and gratuitous taunt
wasn’t going to help.

Someone was supposedly so
offended that they hacked into Slater’s emails. At least that’s the explanation
put forward for the leaked material on which author Nicky Hager based his book Dirty Politics. So you could say it was
poetic justice that the “feral” post has caused such discomfort for the government.
(Less so for Slater himself, I suspect; I think part of him relishes the
notoriety.)

Only thing is, I’m not sure I
buy the explanation about how Hager came into possession of the emails, any
more than I bought his claim years ago that several National Party sources
independently and simultaneously supplied him with a wodge of emails relating
to Don Brash’s meetings with the Exclusive Brethren.

National Party people, leaking
to a known left-wing crusader at the expense of their own party? It seemed highly
improbable then and it still seems improbable now.

What makes me suspicious is
that whoever hacked Slater’s emails subsequently began drip-feeding them on Twitter in a
carefully phased operation obviously calculated to cause maximum political
damage. As TV3 political editor Patrick Gower pointed out, that required
a high degree of political and media savvy.

Suspicion has fallen on Kim
Dotcom (hardly surprising, given that he boasted at the weekend about hacking
the German chancellor’s credit rating), but both Dotcom and Hager
strenuously deny his involvement.

Whoever’s responsible, it began to look less like the work of someone who had spontaneously attacked Slater’s
email account out of anger at the “feral” headline, and more like an example of
the political “black ops” that Hager supposedly despises.

Hager’s role in the affair has
largely escaped critical scrutiny. He has been a trenchant critic of clandestine
surveillance of private communications in the past – indeed, wrote a book about
it. Yet here he is, using stolen emails to write a book whose publication is
timed to derail a party he obviously opposes.

He apparently made no effort to
corroborate his information, as a responsible journalist would do, yet he insists
on calling himself a journalist because it conveys the erroneous impression
that he’s even-handed and has no political agenda.

In my opinion Hager’s double
standard – one rule for intelligence agencies, another for him – is contemptible.
Yet the media have largely allowed him to claim the moral high ground.

Ah yes, the media. To be
fair, the press could hardly ignore Hager’s book. Reporters would have been
remiss if they hadn’t asked hard questions of John Key, as Radio New Zealand’s
Guyon Espiner did on Morning Report.
Key has rarely, if ever, sounded less comfortable.

But sometimes the media get
so excited that the chase itself becomes the story. Even Fairfax political
reporter Andrea Vance wondered on television at the weekend whether, in their frenzied
pursuit of the Dirty Politics story, journalists
had done the public a disservice by largely ignoring other important election issues.

What we don’t know (or didn’t
at the time of writing) is whether the media firestorm has swung support away
from the government or had any impact on the undecided voter. Many people
quickly lose interest in what they regard as Beltway issues and tune out.

Finally, what about the
government’s performance? That brings me back to the D-word.

As irritating as Hager’s sanctimony
is, we are left with the disgusting reality that he has exposed government
involvement in sleazy smear campaigns and machinations of a type that Richard
Nixon would have approved. The political process, which has historically been
remarkably clean in New Zealand, has been tainted.

Almost as objectionable was
the prime minister’s dissembling and evasiveness as he tried unconvincingly,
day after day, to defend his indefensible justice minister, whom he should have
sacked at the outset, and his bland pretence that despite the billowing clouds
of smoke, there was no fire.

Key is partly right when he
says the election has been stolen from us, but he needs only to look over his
shoulder to see the people responsible.

The irony is that two weeks
ago, he had this election virtually in the bag. If National loses, it will have
only its own hubris to blame.

Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Today I revisited Giovanni Tiso's series of tweets last week about Jane Clifton's Listener column on Nicky Hager's book Dirty Politics. Here are some of the words he used: "turgid", "shit", "supercilious", "cynical".

Clifton is a hugely experienced and well-informed observer of New Zealand politics. She's also astute, even-handed, eloquent and funny, which explains why tens of thousands of Listener readers turn to her every week to make sense of events that would otherwise leave them scratching their heads. I thought her column on the Dirty Politics furore was one of her best. But such judgments are subjective and Tiso is entitled to disagree, even if his language is intemperate.

Could his manic attack on Clifton (I counted 35 tweets over a short period, which sounds dangerously close to obsessional) be upheld as fair comment, then? Well, perhaps it could have been, except for a couple of things.

One is that he implies she's a sociopath. Tiso quotes a line from her column - "They are both advancing a political cause" (a reference to Hager and Cameron Slater) - and then adds: "And if you think that, you're a sociopath". I've read this several times and don't see how it can be construed as meaning anything other than that Clifton is a sociopath, which my dictionary defines as "someone affected by any of various personality disorders characterised by asocial or antisocial behaviour".

Okay, you could argue that in the Wild West of the twittersphere, even insults like "sociopath" are acceptable. I'm sure Tiso didn't mean it literally; he was indulging in hyperbole for rhetorical impact.

But hang on. What happened when I took a poke at Tiso in this blog, using a similar rhetorical device against him? (I said he shouldn't be allowed out in public without a minder, and suggested someone should adjust his medication.) He howled that I was being cruel - "vile" was his exact word - because he had a daughter with an intellectual disability, which he claimed (wrongly) I was aware of. Then he had the gall to whimper about people being unpleasant and indulging in ad hominem arguments. Well, hello.

Let's get this straight then: it's okay for Tiso to call a respected columnist a sociopath because he doesn't like her take on the Dirty Politics affair, but it's mean and horrid to suggest that he might be a bit doolally himself. That's taking unfair advantage.

There's a term in boxing for people who love to throw punches but crumple when anyone hits back. They're called crystal chins. Tiso is a crystal chin.

But here's the other thing about him. It obviously eats him up that people like Clifton are allowed to express opinions that don't conform with his. The same zealous intolerance drove his successful campaign to have two RadioLive hosts taken off the air because they asked questions Tiso didn't like.

He was pleased with himself over that one. What could be more satisfying to a Marxist than having weak-kneed capitalists capitulate at the expense of free speech?

Perhaps he thought he could pull it off again, because he was clearly pushing on Twitter at the weekend for the Listener - one of my sources of income as a freelance journalist - to punish me for hurting his feelings. It doesn't seem to have occurred to him that I'm a free agent, and that this blog has nothing to do with the work I do for the Listener.

Keep it up, Gio. If you carry on like this I really will wonder whether you've got some sort of personality disorder.

Sunday, August 24, 2014

It's surely a sign of Giovanni Tiso's overweening self-regard that he assumes I remember every detail of his interview by Kim Hill earlier this year, in which reference was apparently made to his intellectually disabled daughter (see his comment in response to Planet Tiso on Friday). As it happens, I don't remember that detail - or much else from the interview, for that matter. Tiso's just not that interesting. I simply recall thinking that he sounded surprisingly normal.

For the record, then, my comment about Tiso's medication had nothing whatsoever to do with his daughter. I feel very sorry for anyone with a disabled child. I'm not insensitive to mental disability or illness, as I think I've demonstrated in newspaper columns here and here. But if Tiso thinks he can dish out bile with impunity while somehow being protected against retaliation because of his unfortunate personal circumstances, he's dreaming.

Saturday, August 23, 2014

Nigel Latta is one of those phenomena that happen when
you’re not looking. One day, no one had heard of him; the next, it seemed you
couldn’t turn on your TV set without seeing him.

His quirky method of presentation – walking backwards,
making exaggerated gestures and pulling funny faces for the camera – obviously
appealed to viewers. His shows on parenting not only rated well but spun off
into live performances and national tours.

The clinical psychologist became a certified celebrity. Now
he’s been further transmogrified into what is loosely termed a guru – no longer
just an authority on parenting, but an oracle on the great issues of our time.

His latest series (curiously timed to coincide with the
election campaign, as was Bryan Bruce’s overwrought 2011 documentary Inside Child Poverty) examines
hot-button concerns such as inequality, education and alcohol.

I made a point of watching the programme about alcohol because
it’s an issue on which New Zealanders have historically been subjected to misinformation
and dishonest propaganda from both sides.

Was Latta going to present a clear-eyed, non-partisan perspective?
The publicity blurb for the series led us to expect he would, promising that he
would “sort fact from spin”.

In the event, he did nothing of the sort. The show turned
out to be a wearily predictable litany of neo-wowser laments from the usual
academic finger-waggers.

Professor Doug Sellman? Check. Professor Sally Casswell? Check.
Professor Jennie Connor? Check. Dr Paul Quigley? Check. (Dr Quigley works in
the emergency department at Wellington Hospital, which gives him an aura of
coalface cred – but it also means that he sees the very worst side of alcohol abuse,
so may not be the most objective judge.)

As the po-faced professors droned, the picture became ever gloomier.
There’s no such thing as a safe level of consumption, we were told (that was
Connor). Supermarkets are the country’s biggest drug dealers (Sellman). Alcohol
is a neurotoxin that prevents us thinking logically. (I think that was Connor
again; perhaps they edited out the important proviso that this happens only if
you drink too much.)

And of course Latta parroted the hoary old canard that we’re
at the mercy of shadowy liquor czars – foreign ones at that – who have our
venal politicians in their pockets.

It was disappointing to see Sir Geoffrey Palmer buying into
this doom-laden nonsense, but Palmer is a man whose earnest desire to do the
right thing has taken him to some strange places. Perhaps he’s feeling guilty
about having presided over the liberalisation of the liquor laws (which he no
doubt thought was the right thing to do then) in 1989.

Between interview sequences, we were shown familiar stock
footage of drunk teenagers in places like Courtenay Place, the implication
being that they represent the typical New Zealand drinker. Latta seemed
appalled that some kids had to pass liquor outlets on their way to school,
as if such places emanated some sort of lethal miasma.

We met a woman who has terminal cancer at 32. She had been a
drinker and now wished someone had told her that alcohol could cause cancer.
Who wouldn’t feel sorry for her? But to imply that her cancer must have been
caused by drinking was disgraceful, even cruel.

If everyone who drank got cancer, most of us would have been
dead years ago. It would have been more valid to talk to women in their 80s who
have been moderate drinkers all their lives and remain healthy and mentally
alert.

Latta claimed to have invited liquor industry interests to
take part, but they declined. They should have accepted, because refusal made
it look as if they had something to be ashamed of.

But perhaps they sensed the cards would be stacked against
them. The one industry person who agreed to talk to Latta, a hapless
spokeswoman for the industry-funded Tomorrow Project, was subjected to an
aggressively sceptical line of questioning that was completely at variance with
his sycophantic acceptance of the Sellman-Casswell-Connor propaganda.

Throughout the programme, I had a nagging feeling that
something was missing. Then it came to me.

We had heard nothing from the hundreds of thousands of New
Zealanders who enjoy alcohol in moderation, without any adverse effect on their
health or their family life.

These ordinary, responsible New Zealanders had no voice. Latta
framed the issue as a struggle between noble anti-liquor crusaders and wicked
booze barons, with no one in between.

He overlooked the fact that New Zealand alcohol consumption
has declined over the past 30 years and that it’s moderate by world standards
(less, for example, than Germany, Australia, Britain and the Netherlands).

Neither did he mention that drink-drive convictions are in
steady decline. These are inconvenient statistics. Nothing must be allowed to
detract from the message that we’re a nation of helpless drunks.

The lack of balance was so egregiously blatant that I had to
pour myself a stiff drink to calm down. But at least it meant I was mentally
prepared when I watched Latta’s subsequent programme on inequality, which turned
out to be equally selective and melodramatic in its approach.

I’ve now decided a little Latta goes a very long way. I hope
he and Te Radar get along, because I’ve filed them both under Overexposed Hosts
Who Get On My Nerves.

Friday, August 22, 2014

I recently heard the self-described Marxist blogger Giovanni
Tiso being interviewed by Kim Hill. (Fancy that, you’re thinking; a left-wing
guest on Kim Hill’s show. Who’d have thought?) On that occasion Tiso gave a
remarkably convincing impersonation of a sane man. Almost had me fooled. Then
someone drew my attention to his angry stream-of-consciousness yapping on
Twitter about Jane Clifton’s latest Listener
column. I’m now convinced that he’s unhinged and shouldn’t be allowed out in
public without a minder.

Tiso can barely contain his fury that the Listener’s respected political columnist
should have a different take on the Dirty
Politics affair from his own. Such is the far left’s embrace of free
speech. But you have to allow that Tiso is at least consistent in his
intolerance of views that don’t square with his own. This after all is the man
who, to his surprise and delight, managed to get two RadioLive hosts pulled off
the air because he didn’t like what they said during the Roast Busters furore.

What's most intriguing is Tiso’s apparent conviction that an
eager world constantly awaits his latest pronouncement. He appears incapable of
leaving Twitter alone for more than a few seconds. Given that he clearly doesn't have enough to do, perhaps some kind soul could offer him an honest job; he’s bound to have a doctorate in something useless. Or, failing that, at least adjust his medication.

Thursday, August 21, 2014

Darren Watson’s Planet Key video is a wickedly clever piece of political satire, perhaps more so
for Jeremy Jones’ visuals than for the song itself. That it has now become
snagged in the electoral laws is ridiculous and dangerous. University of Otago
law professor Andrew Geddis suggested on Morning
Report that the Electoral Commission is being super-cautious because newish
electoral laws, passed in 2010, haven’t yet been tested in court. Whatever the
explanation, something’s seriously wrong when the heavy hand of the law stifles
legitimate political expression. If the law as written leaves the commission uncertain
as to whether Planet Key is permissible, then it’s bad law and should be reviewed.

Monday, August 18, 2014

Morning Report
today devoted nearly seven minutes to an accident on the Skyline luge at
Rotorua – more than twice as much time as it gave to a fatal helicopter
crash near Wanaka. Guyon Espiner
interviewed a man who witnessed the grisly spectacle while passing overhead on
the chairlift, and who was clearly traumatised by the experience. The witness seemed
indignant that there wasn’t a Victim Support team waiting at the top to offer
immediate counselling.

Goodness me, there was blood visible. Children saw it too
and no doubt would have been left permanently scarred. The witness was appalled
at the Skyline staff’s apparently casual reaction to the tragedy. I half
expected him to call for a commission of inquiry.

Espiner’s co-host Susie Ferguson then leapt in like a tag wrestler
and grilled the company CEO, whose assurance that a paramedic and ambulance
were promptly on the scene was apparently deemed inadequate. Ferguson wanted to
know whether the accident victim might be permanently maimed, and when the
perplexed CEO couldn’t answer that, not being a medical man, she imperiously demanded:
“Why not?”

The company’s callous indifference was considered such an outrage
that the item ran several minutes past the usual break for the 8.30am news.

A listener tuning in halfway through could have been excused
for wondering what awful catastrophe had unfolded. In fact the accident victim had broken
his ankle.

I’ve been on the Skyline luge a number of times, first with
my kids and more recently with my grandchildren, and I’d be surprised if minor
accidents like this weren’t a regular occurrence. People ride on luges because
they provide a thrill. If there wasn’t an element of risk, the business wouldn’t
exist. So why the fuss?

Morning Report can
normally be counted on to provide a refuge from the confected non-news that
other media outlets bombard us with. I bet I’m not the only listener hoping
this was just a momentary lapse of judgment.

Sunday, August 17, 2014

Let me get this straight. Cameron Slater’s Whale Oil site is
hacked in retaliation for a post that upset a lot of people and as a result, a
great swag of incriminating emails ends up in the hands of Nicky Hager.

Meanwhile, Labour’s enemies discover there are weaknesses in
the Labour Party’s website that enable them to go poking around there for
sensitive information, some of which ends up with Slater.

I’m no lawyer, but it seems to me that if either of these
acts was illegal, it’s more likely to have been the hacking of Whale Oil. So
why, on Q+A and The Nation this morning, did the interviewers apply the blowtorch
to Slater and go soft on Hager?

Taking advantage of a website’s slack security may, at
worst, be ethically dodgy, but publishing the contents of private emails
obtained by hacking is surely a lot more serious. Yet both Susan Wood (Q+A) and Lisa
Owen (The Nation) let Hager off the hook while aggressively going after Slater. (Owen, for example,
seemed to be demanding that Slater reveal sources, something no journalist
would dream of doing.)

Hager can’t have believed his luck. But then, perhaps he’s
come to expect this sort of friendly treatment. You can’t help but suspect that
in the eyes of many in the media, Hager has a halo and Slater has horns and a
forked tail.

I’m no cheerleader for Slater. His blog has earned
its place in the media landscape but it’s sometimes gratuitously offensive, as
when he wrote that a “feral” who crashed his car on the West Coast while trying
to evade police deserved to die – the comment that supposedly triggered the attack
on his website. He was making a legitimate point but overcooked it, presumably for
the purpose of provoking a reaction, which he got - in spades.

The comments posted on Whale Oil, too, are often rabid, and
I was pleased to hear him say this morning that he intends to exercise tighter
moderation. Not before time.

I don’t like cosy collusion between journalists (or in this
case bloggers) and cabinet ministers or government spin doctors either. They
smell. But Slater is hardly the first media person to be favoured with sneaky leaks
and tipoffs. As has been pointed out over the past few days, Helen Clark had
her favourites in the press gallery too.

And anyway, what about Hager’s motives? He likes to call
himself an investigative journalist, but he’s nothing of the sort. In truth he’s
a polemicist who happens to use some journalistic skills, such as writing and
ferreting out information (which, to be fair, he does pretty well, if selectively).

Hager dislikes being called an activist, but it’s a more
honest description of his role than “journalist”. The giveaway is that he seems
very choosy about the subjects he writes about, and in the way he covers them.

Invariably he pushes issues dear to the left, and does it in
a way that presents the right – whether it’s the business sector, the National
Party or the Exclusive Brethren – in the worst possible light. To put it
another way, he’s agenda-driven. That isn’t journalism.

As proof of his supposed neutrality, he cites the fact that
he embarrassed Clark’s Labour government in 2002 with his book Seeds of Distrust (published, like Dirty Politics, immediately before an
election, so as to achieve maximum political impact), in which he exposed the
accidental release of genetically modified corn.

But this doesn’t prove a thing – least of all that he had no
political motive, as he would clearly like us to think. The truth, I suspect, is
that Hager is well to the left of Labour and would have been hoping that the
timely publication of Seeds of Distrust
would benefit the Greens, a party which I believe he’s more attuned with.

Hager’s book was given the title Dirty Politics for a good reason – to create the impression of
moral rot on the part of the government and its cheerleaders. The irony is that
Hager is as much a part of the dirty politics he writes about as John Key,
Slater, Judith Collins and Jason Ede. And I suspect the reaction of most neutral
voters will be, to paraphrase Shakespeare, “A plague on all their houses”.

Friday, August 15, 2014

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, August 13.)

This election is shaping up
to be the strangest in my lifetime.

There’s a cacophony of minor
parties scrambling for attention and a frenzied political bidding war in which there
seems to be no limit on the extravagance of the promises made.

We’ve had an outbreak of
thinly disguised xenophobia over the sale of a farm, a sideshow over the use of
the phrase “Sugar Daddy”, and a blatant appeal to the emotions of voters who
imagine New Zealand can raise the drawbridge and retreat into a cosy and safe
economic fortress, 1970s-style.

And all this is taking place
within the context of a seriously flawed electoral system originally
devisedto prevent an extremist party
such as the Nazis regaining power in Germany, as if that were somehow
applicable to New Zealand.

The weirdness is so
all-pervasive it’s hard to know where to start. But let’s begin with the
largest (literally) and most bizarre factor of all.

The very name Kim Dotcom suggests
a character from a Batman or Austin Powers movie. But while Dotcom likes to
present himself as something of a fun-loving jester figure, he’s
a noxious force in politics.

If there was any doubt about
that, it was erased by the Internet-Mana Party video on YouTube in which Dotcom
urged an apparently liquored-up audience of Christchurch students to chant
“F--- John Key”.

Apologists for Dotcom have
tried to excuse this as free expression and youthful exuberance. It was nothing
of the sort.

Whatever you think about Key
(and I’ve never been a fan) this was rabble-rousing at its basest and most
puerile level. Dotcom looked like a grotesque cross between a gangsta rapper
and the Fuhrer at Nuremberg.

Policy? Issues? Never mind that tedious stuff. Let's bring it all down to mindless, hateful abuse.The video did, however, serve
one useful purpose: it left no one in any doubt that what primarily drives Dotcom
is deep personal animosity against Key.

No matter what you think
about the other figures in this election campaign, you have to allow that they
are all motivated by genuine concern for New Zealand. But Dotcom doesn’t give
that impression.

The question voters should
ask themselves is whether a toxic personal grudge is a sound reason for
entering politics (not forgetting, of course, that Dotcom may also be motivated
by a desperate desire to avoid extradition to the United States, where he’s
wanted for Internet piracy).

Relax, the apologists for
Internet-Mana say; Dotcom won’t necessarily have any influence on party policy.
If you believe that, you probably also believe in chem trails. He doesn’t
strike me as the sort of person to put $3 million into a party if he’s not
going to have any control over it.

Which brings us to Laila
Harre, the nominal leader of the Dotcom-funded party. Of all the performers in
the current political circus, she is the one whose reputation has been most
damaged.

Harre once commanded respect
as a leftist politician of conviction. In aligning herself with Dotcom she has
redefined herself as a rank opportunist – a retread, desperate to revive her
political career even if it means throwing her lot in with a flashy and
extremely rich capitalist entrepreneur with an opaque agenda.

Try as she might, she will
never overcome the perception that she has betrayed her proletarian principles
in the pursuit of power.

So what of the other players
in this most bizarre election campaign?

There’s the cerebral and
unworldly Jamie Whyte, whose Herculean task is to rebuild the discredited Act. Whyte
is a conviction politician, just as Harre once was on the other side, but it’s
hard to escape the feeling that Act has no gas left in its tank.

There’s Colin Craig, who
hopes to capture the substantial social conservative vote, but who seems
determined to sabotage himself. I mean, who persuaded him to pose for that
tragically misguided photo where he’s lying in the grass with a come-hither
look?

Craig is another conviction
politician, but like Whyte, he’s up against a media that is at worst hostile, at
best unsympathetic. The last thing he needs is to provide ammunition to the
mockers, but he can’t seem to help himself.

Then there’s Winston Peters.
There’s always Winston Peters. But I wonder if this could be the old warhorse’s
last charge. If New Zealand First doesn’t get past the five per cent threshold,
I can’t see Peters sticking around for another three years – in which case that
could be the end of the party too, unless Ron Mark can be persuaded to take
over.

And of course, lastly there’s
Key. His preternatural popularity is a complete mystery, but you can’t
argue with the opinion polls.

The only thing standing
between Key and a third election victory is the MMP system, the vagaries of which
could still deliver a rogue result in the form of a dysfunctional coalition
cobbled together from the disparate, angry forces of the left.

As a journalist, I find it riveting;
as a citizen concerned for our future, I find myself getting more apprehensive
as the big day approaches.

FOOTNOTE: This was written last weekend, before the Nicky Hager bombshell. What was previously our most bizarre campaign ever is now also shaping up to be the ugliest.

Saturday, August 9, 2014

I WAS INTRIGUED to hear Sir
Bob Harvey, the personable former Waitakere mayor and tireless champion of West
Auckland, describe himself on TVNZ’s Q+A
programme recently as a socialist.

Obviously the meaning of the
word has changed. The classical definition of a socialist is someone who
believes in state control of the economy, but no intelligent person – and
Harvey is an intelligent man – could seriously argue that the heavy hand of the
state creates happy, prosperous societies.

I mean, what shining examples
are there? The Soviet Union? North Korea? Chaotic, wretched Venezuela, perhaps?

The truth is that wherever it
has been tried, socialism has been synonymous with economic failure, misery and
repression. That’s why it’s almost
extinct. People aren’t stupid.

I can only conclude,
therefore, that when people like Harvey describe themselves as socialists, they
actually mean something else – perhaps a gentler, kinder socialism that hasn’t
yet been revealed to the rest of us.

Here’s my theory. I suspect
that to call yourself a socialist these days is to announce to the world that
you have a social conscience, and are therefore on a higher moral plane than all
those heartless people who are interested only in their own wellbeing.

In addition to that, I
suspect that “socialist” has become a code word for someone who feels guilty
about enjoying the trappings of capitalism – the stylish clothes, the
overseas holidays, the restored villas in fashionable inner-city suburbs.

Most of the people I know who think of themselves as socialists enjoy pretty sweet lives. Capitalism has been
very kind to them. I bet Harvey (who made his name in advertising, possibly the
least socialist business imaginable) isn’t exactly short of a buck.

But we’re talking about a
generation that lived through the heady era of the protest movement, when
capitalism was the enemy, and part of them has never moved on.

Even when they’ve grown sleek
and prosperous, in their minds they’re still marching down Willis or Queen St protesting
against apartheid or the Vietnam War. Calling themselves socialist is a
convenient way of resolving the contradiction between their romantic ideals and
the reality of their very comfortable capitalist lives.

True socialists like the
founders of the Labour Party wouldn’t recognise these people.

Being a socialist in those
days meant getting your head bashed in by a special constable on horseback. Now
it means sitting around a Kelburn dinner table tut-tutting about income
disparity while someone opens a bottle of 2003 Felton Road pinot noir and
wonders whether to go to Morocco or France for their next holiday.

* * *

IT’S DECADES since newspapers
decided they would no longer accept letters written under pseudonyms. Most
require that the writer supply a full name, home address and phone number. It’s
not foolproof, but it weeds out most of the mischief-makers who don’t have the
guts to put their names to their opinions.

Predictably, the quality of
letters improved almost overnight when the rules were changed.

Contrast this with the
approach of the Sunday political TV programmes Q+A and The Nation, which
seem happy to accept anonymous texts and emails commenting – often scurrilously
– on the issues under discussion and the credibility of the politicians
interviewed.

Some contributors provide a
first name, but the viewer has no way of knowing whether it’s genuine. Occasionally
the commenter is identified in full, but most are anonymous.

Given that the comments are
displayed on screen almost instantaneously, there’s no way the producers can
vet them in the hope of weeding out propagandists and barrow-pushers.

How many of the snide messages
running across the bottom of the screen are from party members and activists?
There’s no way of knowing. In effect, they’re no better than the cowardly trolls
who infest the Internet.

* * *

I WONDER, is there a club for
people who can’t stand Te Radar? If not, I might have to start one.

I admit I’m out of step with
public opinion here. Clearly, lots of people love him. Why else would TVNZ (or to be
precise, the taxpayer through New Zealand on Air) keep paying him to
jaunt around the Pacific making prime-time documentaries?

But something about Te Radar
irritates me, and I can’t figure out exactly whatit is. The frizzy hair? Those nerdy glasses?
That nasal Kiwi voice? The contrived Peter Pan quirkiness? All of the above?

What bothers me most is that
the people he encounters in faraway places might make the mistake of thinking
he’s representative of the rest of us. Now there’s a scary thought.

Friday, August 1, 2014

Cornelius Devitt died in Wellington a couple of weeks ago.
That name would mean nothing to younger New Zealanders, but to those of a
certain age, Con Devitt was once a household name. In fact you could almost say
he was public enemy number one.

Devitt was a trade union official. To be precise, he was secretary
of the Boilermakers’ Union.

That may not sound significant, but the Boilermakers’ Union
included the workers who did the welding on construction jobs involving
structural steel.

It was a small union, but it wielded power far beyond its
size because it effectively controlled some of the country’s biggest
construction jobs. And in the 1970s, under Devitt’s leadership, the
Boilermakers’ Union was synonymous with militancy and disruption.

Most notoriously, the union was blamed for endless delays in
the building of Wellington’s showpiece BNZ Centre. Begun in 1973 and intended
for completion in 1977, the 31-storey building wasn’t finished until 1984. The
final cost was four times greater than the original estimate.

The BNZ site wasn’t the only one where the boilermakers made
their presence felt. They were also involved in long-running disputes at Mangere
Bridge, Marsden Point oil refinery and the Kawerau pulp and paper mill.

But the BNZ job caused the greatest outrage. It was in the
heart of Wellington and thus smack-bang in the public eye. And because the BNZ
in those days was still state-owned, the taxpayer had a direct stake in it. One
consequence of the BNZ fiasco was that New Zealand architects stopped designing
buildings that depended on structural steelwork.

I interviewed Devitt in 1995 and he insisted the union was
made a scapegoat for other problems on the BNZ job. I’m sure there was an
element of truth in that, but there was no doubt that the boilermakers were a
bloody-minded lot who seized any excuse they could for downing tools. On one memorable occasion they went on strike because a union delegate didn’t like his company-issue boots.

Rob Muldoon was prime minister then, and he was in the habit
of referring to “Clydeside militants” – a shorthand term for left-wing unionists
from Britain who attained positions of influence in New Zealand unions. That
was a direct reference to Devitt, whose early days were spent in Glasgow’s
Clydeside area, then a hive of heavy industry. Devitt proudly told me it was
known as “Red Clydeside” on account of its tradition of union militancy.

Devitt, who was 86 when he died, was one of the last of a
generation of union leaders whose faces were very familiar to New Zealanders in
the 1970s and early 80s. They included Bill Andersen (Drivers’ Union), Pat
Kelly (Cleaners and Caretakers), Blue Kennedy and Frank McNulty (Meat Workers), Don Goodfellow
(Railwaymen) and Jim Knox (Federation of Labour president).

Some were Marxists, though not always openly so.
Factionalism ran deep within the union movement, not only between militants and
conservatives (of whom the Irish Catholic Tony Neary, of the Electrical
Workers’ Union, was the figurehead) but also within the left – most notably
between Moscow-aligned communists and those who took their ideological cue from
Beijing.

It was a time when militant unions wreaked economic havoc in
key industries. Freezing works, the wharves, car assembly plants, transport
(especially the Cook Strait ferries, which were seen as especially vulnerable)
and the pulp and paper industry were often targeted.

It was ironic that Muldoon, despite his much-vaunted
tough-guy image, never got on top of the union problem. Unions went on strike
with almost complete impunity throughout his nine years in power, and no doubt
contributed to the woefully sick economy that Labour inherited in 1984.

Only a handful of union survivors from that era remain. They
include Ken Douglas, who went on to head the Council of Trade Unions, and
former Seafarers’ Union president Dave Morgan, though neither remains active in
union affairs. Douglas tried to hold the movement together when it began to
break apart in the late 1980s and was savagely attacked for supposedly betraying
the workers – another irony, given his socialist and militant credentials.

It all seems a lifetime ago, which I suppose it was. Yet
that period of strong-arm unionism left an enduring legacy.

Many New Zealanders retain sharp memories of the damage done
by industrial turmoil. That goes a long way toward explaining why the union
movement today is a shadow of what it once was.

Economic upheaval, deregulation and globalisation wiped out
the old centres of union power, such as the big freezing works and car assembly
plants. Politicians did the rest, passing new employment laws that tipped the
scales in favour of employers.

The abolition of compulsory trade union membership in 1991
was a turning point. Some militant blue-collar unions never wanted it in the
first place, believing the movement was weakened by numerically large unions,
such as those covering retail and clerical workers, whose members were not
strongly committed to union principles and were reluctant to take industrial
action.

Today, less than 17 percent of the labour force is unionised
and some once-formidable unions no longer exist. Others have shrunk or have been
absorbed by others. Power has shifted to white-collar unions, such as the
teachers’ and nurses’ organisations.

There’s a new generation of union leaders – typically much better-educated
than their predecessors, more media-savvy and less locked into old,
class-warfare mindsets. And because unionism is no longer compulsory, unions
have to work a lot harder to attract and retain members, which they do.

I believe that in some ways, the balance of power in
industrial relations has swung too far in favour of employers. Workers need
strong, effective representation to protect themselves against abuse and
exploitation.

But if today’s union leaders want to understand why
politicians have nobbled them, they need only look back at the rampant abuse of
power by militant unions in the era of Con Devitt.

About Me

I am a freelance journalist and columnist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I'm a former musician (bass and guitar) with a lifelong love of music that led me to write my book 'A Road Tour of American Song Titles: From Mendocino to Memphis', published by Bateman NZ in July 2016. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.